I read this book a while ago, but hadn't gotten around to writing a review, or organizing my thoughts about it in any coherent way. Until now. So here they are, for what it's worth.

Mohammed's Koran is presented as a Koran, accompanied by a brief introduction. At first glance, it even appears to be just this. In fact, it is something quite different.

The introduction is the purpose of the book, in the same way that the payload is the purpose of a missile. I think it right to compare it to Emile Zola's "J'accuse...!", written more than a century earlier. It is a searing indictment of the cowardice of the western elites, and their willing accomplices in the media, on the path of pre-emptive surrender. All the lies and omissions we have become so used to hearing are laid out in detail. They are named as lies, in a clear, uncompromising manner.

It is a bold salvo against the greatest lie which is suffocating the west - "Islam is a religion of peace"; the lie which paralyzes us, making us unable to even recognize the threat. The purpose of this book is give the average man in the street the confidence to deny this lie when he hears it.

There is, in fact, a Koran in this book. If the introduction is the weapon, then the Koran is both cloak and shield. It shields the authors against the accusation that they have wrenched verses out of context. It forces into the foreground the Islamic concept of abrogation, without which it is impossible to resolve contradictory verses when they are quoted to you in an argument. Every abrogated verse has a line through it, with a reference to the verse which replaces it. Simple, and effective.

It functions as a cloak in the sense that it uses as camouflage the same multicultural pieties which it despises. What journalist could afford to condemn a Koran? It reeks of Islamophobia. A lot of people might be happy, in principle, to burn a book by Tommy Robinson. I'm not sure how they would handle this one. The only solution is to ignore it, but that's not so effective in this age of the internet, with ebooks to make it instantly available, and facebook/blogs/twitter to spread the word.

In short, it's a clever - perhaps brilliant - piece of propaganda in a good cause. Tommy Robinson and Peter McLoughlin have forged an effective weapon for the counter-jihad. One is tempted to speculate which of them had a greater hand in crafting it. This would take a deeper investigation than I have conducted. I've read both Easy Meat and Enemy of the State, and quite frankly neither of them seem like an obvious literary antecedent (as opposed to an ideological one) of this work. Perhaps the team was greater than the sum of its parts. Perhaps the occasion called forth the man. Or perhaps I should have re-read them before speculating.

Be that as it may, the work does have a few flaws, or perhaps I should say, oversights. These do not, I think, detract much from the correctness of the argument or from its strength in the eyes of a casual reader. Academics may use them as an excuse to dismiss the importance of the work, but this, I think, will also be without much effect.

1) Robinson and McLoughlin repeatedly claim that the elites are deliberately lying to us. They say, 'Do you think the elites who went to the best universities didn't know that Islam was a violent religion?'. Here, I think, they is simply mistaken. My belief is that the elites in the universities are eargerly deceiving themselves, preferring to signal their virtue by uttering agreed-upon pieties, rather than seeking the truth and speaking it.

2) Robinson and McLoughlin repeatedly assume that verses which refer to idolators are to be understood as referring to westerners. Technically speaking, this is not so. Christians (and Jews) are people of the book, and the Koran takes care to distinguish between people of the book and idolators.

Of course, a very strong argument can be made that this distinction is, at this point, merely technical. One might argue that westerners qualify as idolators in the Koran's eyes, simply because most of them are so irreligious, or because Islam considers the west to be at war against Islam. One might argue that muslim theologians do not, in practice, make this distinction. One might argue that ISIS and similar terrorists do not make this distinction, even if muslim theologians do. One might argue that in the might-makes-right attitude typical of Islamic supremacists, a westerner is a Christian when we feel like collecting Jizya, and an idolator when we feel like cutting off heads. Was any ISIS beheading video was ever cut short when the intended victim pulled out a donation receipt for an Islamic charity?

Now, some or all of these arguments may be true or false, but Robinson and McLoughlin do not make any of them, probably because they did not find them necessary. Koranic scholars may shake their heads at this. But I would find Tommy Robinson's experience growing up in Luton of greater predictive value to me, personally, than any theoretical argument. If he grew up as he did without ever noticing this distinction, I'll trust his gut instinct more than any academic's argument.

3) Robinson and McLoughlin have observed Muslim dishonesty about Islamic violence. They attribute it to certain verses in the Koran, which encourage and justify such behavior. They do not consider other possible sources of such behavior. Personally, I think that this behavior has a strong cultural origin, and a weak religious justification. The authors point only to the religious justification, and interpret it as the origin. This argument, I think, will not be convincing, or will perhaps be easily refuted. This will not be due to a deep Islamic honesty towards kuffar. Middle-class English converts to Islam may repeat lies they have been told, but will not become liars themselves. Conversely, Muslims from the middle east will as readily lie to protect their family's honor as to glorify their religion. These behaviors cannot be explained by reference to a Koranic verse. It is true, of course, that culture and religion are not easy to disentangle. But I think the true origin of this error (as I see it) is that the religion has a text written down which explains it, and the text can be understood simply by reading it. The main parts of a culture are often unstated (especially those parts that deal with honor and shame) and understanding it is the work of a lifetime.

These flaws - perhaps I should say quibbles - do not detract much (if at all) from the potential impact of this book. I hope it gains the widest possible audience. Currently there are 581 reviews on amazon.co.uk, and 230 on amazon.com. These are very promising numbers. It is not available on bookdepository.com (I had to get my copy from the USA). It seems that it was self-published under McLoughlin's name - this suggests that no publisher was willing to touch it.

A few words ought to be said about the courage these two men have shown, in publishing this book. Perhaps some day someone will find such words.